Evaluations
Evaluation Report: Community Exchange project between detainees at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre and young people at West London YMCA
The report explores the project’s impacts on participants’ wellbeing and resilience, awareness and understanding, and musical skills. Based on observations, questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, it contains a wealth of detail about the creative process and the experience of participants. The report also looks at the project as an example of ... read on →
The Arts of Desistance: Evaluation of the Koestler Trust Arts Mentoring Programme for Former Prisoners
This report presents and discusses the findings of an evaluation of an arts-based mentoring scheme that is aimed at prolonging and enhancing desistance from crime through providing former prisoners with opportunities to continue engaging with the arts after release. The evaluation focused both on the implementation and effectiveness of the ... read on →
Write to be Heard: Supporting Offender Learning through Creative Writing
The report explores the impact of a creative writing programme developed to engage ‘hard to reach’ learners in prison. The mechanism was a creative writing competition, incorporating a schedule of workshops in 28 prisons, encouraging entrants to write pieces for broadcast on National Prison Radio (NPR). Using qualitative and quantitative ... read on →
Sounding Out - Jim Cartwright
The report followed Music in Prisons as they ran a pilot ‘through the gate’ project which, through music, aimed to provide longer-term rehabilitative opportunities to previous project participants in order to help bridge the gap between life inside and out prison. The key aims were to assist reintegration; impact on ... read on →
An Evaluation of a Pilot Study of a Literature-Based Intervention with Women in Prison
This study investigated whether ‘Get Into Reading’, a literature-based intervention, which had been established in other custodial contexts and non-custodial mental health settings in the UK transposed to a female prison; HMP Low Newton, and whether any of the benefits identified in custodial and non-custodial contexts elsewhere were reported by ... read on →
Miss Spent in Custody
An independent evaluation of a pilot for a new skills development course for young women in custody delivered by Clean Break in April 2010. The evaluation report identified that the project convincingly demonstrated the value of drama exercises, creative education and the use of role play in teaching personal skills, ... read on →
Elmina's Kitchen
An evaluation of the impact of the performance of play in HMP Brixton on the Synergy Theatre participants invloved and the audiences. read on →
Child's Play: Evaluation Report
An evaluation of the impact of a NYT drama project on the paretning skills and rehabilitation of young offenders. The experiential nature of this course enabled participants to explore and experience the issues they are likely to face as young fathers in prison, whilst incarcerated, and on release. The experiential ... read on →
What's the Point: using drama to engage young people at risk
This report summarises the findings of case study research into a drama based Positive Activities for Young People (PAYP) project. The findings of this case study research suggest the following factors need to be considered and implemented for the effective use of arts projects within key programmes targeting young people ... read on →
Impact of Fathers Inside – an OLSU and Safe Ground Parenting Course for male prisoners at HMP Ashwell
A nine month evaluation of Fathers Inside at HMP Ashwell that includes a range of data from programme documents, comparative literature and research, direct observation of the programme, and from semi-structured interviews with participant prisoners, their partners, child-carers and children. It concludes that Fathers Inside brings about changes in parenting ... read on →
